


To Stick Up, to Be Hammered Down

by SegaBarrett



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, First Kiss, Growing Up, Jealousy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26278816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Petunia made it a point to ignore Lily.
Relationships: Petunia Evans Dursley/Lily Evans Potter, Petunia Evans Dursley/Vernon Dursley
Comments: 5
Kudos: 8
Collections: RelationShipping 2020





	To Stick Up, to Be Hammered Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wolf_of_Lilacs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolf_of_Lilacs/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, and I make no money from this.

Petunia remembered that it had been a normal day. She had just come home from school, and Lily was following right behind her. 

Lily always tended to do things like that. If it had been up to her, she would have been in Petunia’s class even. Instead, she seemed to settle for meeting her outside of school and running behind her, gleefully skipping, smiling.

There was some secret behind her eyes today, and she wondered if it had anything to do with that nasty boy they had met in the park. She hoped Lily wasn’t going to think about bringing that boy around. All they needed was the neighbors craning in on either side and asking what the Evans girls were doing, who they were seeing, and whispering to one another. 

Petunia would just die if that happened.

She hated being the center of attention, hated those moments when everyone looked at her in class because there was something in her teeth, had waking nightmares of being called on and not knowing the answer.

“Petunia!” Lily called, “Wait up! You don’t need to race me home. We have plenty of time before there’s anything to watch on the telly, anyway.”

Petunia rolled her eyes, starting to walk faster, but not so fast that she could be accused of running. Only desperate, lonely, sad people ran places. Only desperate, lonely, sad people ran away from a sister like Lily who, ask anyone, just wanted to be Petunia’s friend.

Petunia couldn’t stand it.

She made it to the front door first, and resisted the urge to tap the door and yell that she had claimed a base, the way they used to when she was a kid. When she was a younger kid, if she was being proper about it.

“Petunia, honey.” Her mother’s voice wafted out from the kitchen. 

“What?” Petunia yelled back.

“Be careful. Your father nearly got hit in the head by an owl earlier today. Isn’t that just the oddest thing?”

“Sure it is, Mum,” Petunia replied. “Did you need any help with anything?”

The question was for show, because it always seemed to be Lily who was popping up to help set the table, and she didn’t even usually have to ask. 

Not that Petunia wanted to, anyway, but it was the principle of the thing.

“You can run up and start your homework, Petunia. We’ll be fine.”

***

She tried to stare at her maths homework, tried to flip over each and every sheet. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was happening downstairs that she needed to see.

With Lily, it seemed like something was always going on. 

So she crept down the steps, listening. 

Just in time to watch her mother open the door and let an owl swoop in.

“What’s this?” 

Petunia felt a pit in her stomach, one that she couldn’t explain but couldn’t shake, either. 

She took another, further step.

“Oh, Petunia!” 

She had been spotted; she couldn’t run back up now.

“Tuney!” Lily exclaimed, running forward, out of nowhere, and wrapping her arms around Petunia, bouncing in excitement. “You won’t believe what just happened, you really, really won’t!”

“Try me,” Petunia replied dryly. If something amazing had happened, it had to be all for Lily, of course. It couldn’t be that the entire family had won the lottery, or something, but it had to be that Lily had won some contest over her stupid art or some dumb essay.

Petunia could remember the time her teacher had leaned down and said, “I just met your sister, what a dazzling young talent she is!”

Talent at what, Petunia had wanted to ask, but hadn’t, opting to scowl instead. 

“I got this letter, and… and… an owl brought it! Remember those things I showed you? The things I can do – well, you would never believe it. Someone must have noticed or known or… well, I don’t really quite know how they knew, but they knew and now I get to go to a special school! Can you believe it? Oh, Tuney, I’m so, so happy!” She took a running leap at Petunia and wrapped herself around her, hugging her tight. 

Petunia blinked.

“Oh, how wonderful,” she snarled through the tears, “A school full of freaks like you.”

***

Petunia could have gotten her A levels in not seeing Lily after that. The rest of the summer she avoided her, making a big show of swinging her hips a little wider to knock her into the wall, or better yet sitting at the table talking to her parents as if Lily wasn’t there at all.

On the day their parents dropped Lily off at King’s Cross station, Petunia refused to go.

She stayed in her room, staring at the wall and crying, all the while telling herself that she was not crying at all.

Why would she cry for that stupid Lily, anyway?

***

When Lily came back for Christmas break, Petunia acted as if life was still going on as normal. The teachers at school had stopped asking about how “that sister of yours” was doing, and they would have to be satisfied with just Petunia, just boring and ordinary Petunia.

Which is why, when she sent the letter, she tried to forget about it later. It had just been a lapse – it had just been a blip in the plan, when Petunia had gotten lonely and up in her head and she hadn’t really mean it because what would she even do at a school full of frogs and spells and weirdos?

So why had she asked to be one of those weirdos? Why had her letter bled with pleading – pleading that somewhere within those words there was a hint of magic? What had Lily called herself? A Muggle-born, a kind of rarity, but she hadn’t said whether it ran in families in a different way. Maybe it was like red hair and it just popped up here and there and maybe Petunia had it too.

Petunia stood in front of the mirror, again and again, willing something, anything in the bathroom to move with her mind.

Willing it to bring her back to Lily.

Whenever it didn’t happen – which was every time, no matter how much she hoped that there was a slight twitch in the toothbrush or a deodorant can turning on its axis just a hair – she told herself that it didn’t matter.

That she was better off, of course she was.

Lily could keep her stupid school. Petunia would just never speak to her again.

***

When Lily came home at the end of her Fourth Year at the mysterious school that she wouldn’t talk – rather, Petunia refused to let her talk about – she looked… different.

Her hair had grown out, and she no longer wrapped it in one long braid but rather let it flow free. She was taller, and her body had shifted; that was the only way for Petunia to describe it. She had shifted.

Petunia had changed, too, but she had made a career out of not noticing it. What good was it to notice it, to flirt with vanity? (To fear that she had no right to be vain in the first place?)

Lily wore her robes home, and Petunia wondered if she even had anything else to wear – did their parents send up clothes so she could go to fancy dances with her fancy magic friends? The thought of it filled Petunia with a rage she couldn’t describe.

But she was sixteen now, and slamming doors and screaming wasn’t the kind of thing a sixteen-year-old was supposed to do. 

So she walked down the steps and looked Lily over, like it didn’t matter at all, and smiled like she didn’t really know who she was.

And she never let Lily hear her cry.

***

When Lily came home in her Sixth Year, she was prettier than Petunia had ever seen her before. Her cheeks flushed with the kind of look Petunia had only ever seen in movie stars, and her hair seemed even redder than before.

She seemed happy, radiant, a ray of sunshine.

“I only wanted to see you, Tuney, most of all,” she said, “We should spend some time together. I spend the whole year wishing you were at Hogwarts with me. Oh, you would be so chuffed at things that happen there… You would have so much fun.”

“Yeah, loads of fun,” Petunia mumbled, but the fact that Lily was back in her orbit knocked the remark off-kilter, knocked her off-kilter too, and made her want to plead for her to stay here, to go to a normal, boring school where she couldn’t bring home frogs and turn umbrellas into scorpions or do whatever it was she actually did there. “You want to go upstairs and talk? It’s been a long time.”

And it had been.

***

Petunia’s room had not changed much in the last six years, objectively. It was still beige and proper and dour. She had a long bed with a twin mattress with rose-colored sheets pulled up over it, and pretty floral pillows strategically placed in each corner of the bed.

A proper bed for a proper young woman, because that was what she was going to be.

Lily sat on the edge of the bed, breathing in. Petunia wondered if she was looking for her scent, because it was all around – it had to be all around. She spent most of her days in here; there was little else to do in town. 

“So… at…” Petunia hesitated, saying the words, “Hogwarts, is there anybody that you like?”

“Oh, yes! I’ve got a lot of friends. It’s so interesting, I mean… I never knew before that there were so many people that can do what I can do!”

“That’s not… what I meant.” Petunia couldn’t look at her.

“I mean… There’s a few guys, I guess,” Lily said, “But you know how boys can be. They’re always showing off. And they beat each other up to impress each other? I never really understood that.”

“I know,” Petunia said, and she shifted a little closer, even though she really didn’t know because she hadn’t been paying attention. Not to boys, anyway. She reached out, allowing her heart to drive her head for just a moment, refusing to let it be anymore, and grasped Lily’s hand in hers. She wondered if Lily might agree not to go back if she pleaded for her to stay, or if she could take her along, maybe magic her into a piece of luggage and wheel her on to the train. Suddenly, the thought of another four months without seeing  
Lily seemed to be the most painful and impossible thing in the entire wide world. “I don’t have anybody. Back here, I mean. No boyfriends or anything.”

“Why not?” Lily asked. “Do you still like that guy… uh, Declan, was his name I think?”

Petunia let out a hollow chuckle.

“Declan Collins? I only like him when I was… thirteen, maybe. I don’t even know where he went. I only liked him because he was very popular… had a lot of money.” It all seemed silly, now, and Petunia couldn’t even really picture him.

“Oh. Well, I thought you liked him a lot. There’s a guy up at Hogwarts… well, two actually. They seem to like me. But they’re both… guys. Big dumb guys trying to prove they’re more masculine than the other one.”

Petunia didn’t reply. She couldn’t. 

There was only one thing that seemed right to do, in fact, and if she kept thinking about it, she was going to talk herself right out of it.

So she grasped Lily’s face by the cheeks – they were such soft cheeks, really – and turned her towards her as if to demand she look at her, not away, not at that other life – and then she planted a kiss right on Lily’s lips. A bit, awkward, passionate kiss, the kind from _Coronation Street_.

She pulled back a moment later, and she would have turned and run if it hadn’t been her own room with nowhere left to go. She had made a mistake; it was a horrible mistake. It was a gambit that could have never paid off. She was going to lose Lily to all that magic stuff for good, because now Lily would look at her as the one who was the freak.

She couldn’t even look at her until Lily reached out and grabbed Petunia’s hand, pulling it back. 

And then she smiled.

“You know I think about you all the time when I’m away, Tuney.”

“Don’t lie to me. I don’t cross your mind a single bit. You’re just telling me that because you’re too nice to be honest with me. So go… go and…” Petunia was ready to be dramatic, to push her away, to scream at her and tell her that the next time that she got on the train, she had better be gone forever because nobody wanted her back. She could almost hear it, underscored by chords and piano and the kind of way that a scene would shift. Like something from _Emmerdale_. 

“I’m not lying, and I’ll prove it.” Lily looked proper now, too, and offended, and as if she was gathering herself up so much that she could barely contain it, as if she could… Before Petunia could finish that thought, Lily leaned in and pressed her own lips against Petunia’s, but this time the kiss was deeper, longer, her tongue sliding it to tease the roof of Petunia’s mouth.

When she pulled away, for air Petunia supposed because she suddenly felt very dizzy, Petunia asked her, “Is that the kind of thing they’re teaching you up at that school?”

Lily smiled.

“No. That’s the kind of thing I’m teaching you. And you’re…” She leaned in again. “Teaching me.”

***

The next year, Petunia ignored Lily when she came home, and acted too busy to talk to her, acted infatuated with Vernon and every single thing he did.

There was nothing infatuating about Vernon in the least, or even vaguely interesting, but she needed to pretend.

And the only way she could pretend was from not looking at Lily at all, from pretending that she didn’t exist.

If she pretended that, her heart wouldn’t skip a beat. Her pulse wouldn’t race.

She would be normal, normal, normal, until the day that she died.


End file.
